You want a ride to LAX? Hah.
Unless we’re married or you have several surgically replaced joints, take the bus. Because I won’t put up with the “horseshoe” of hell.
Few other stretches of pavement in Southern California draw as many groans as the two-level, U-shaped road where travelers get picked up and dropped off at Los Angeles International Airport. At any time of day, the five lanes of traffic are clogged. And despite attempts to improve traffic, such as banishing taxi and rideshare pickups to a remote lot, traffic has only gotten worse.
What hasn’t been tried? One thing practically guaranteed to work: Charging drivers a fee to enter the horseshoe.
Congestion pricing has worked to ease clogged traffic in other busy areas, and it can work here too. As traffic increases, so does the price, encouraging motorists to stay away and making the drive easier for everyone else. Variable tolls should keep cars moving at a more consistent pace through the horseshoe.
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There’s currently no serious proposal for congestion pricing at LAX, which is a shame: Its use there could demonstrate its value on roads throughout Southern California.
Congestion pricing isn’t some dream of auto-skeptic urbanists (like, ahem, me). It is a squarely mainstream, widely embraced tool to make roads work as intended and has a long track record of improving traffic flow in cities across the world since it debuted in Singapore in 1975.
It worked in Stockholm, where residents were overwhelmingly skeptical when the government approved a pilot program in 2006, because they worried it would make the city’s notoriously bad traffic worse.
By the next year, traffic had dropped so dramatically that voters opted to make the program permanent. According to a case study review by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, in the decade after permanent implementation, Stockholm’s population increased by 10% while traffic in the city declined by 22%.
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And it’s working right now in New York, but only after overcoming stiff political headwinds. In 2024, Gov. Kathy Hochul blocked implementation of the plan to charge drivers entering a notoriously gridlocked portion of Manhattan, worried it would “[drive] residents, businesses, and workers out of the city.” But the program went forward in early 2025, and recently Hochul hailed congestion pricing in New York as a “transformational success.”
The governor had many reasons to come around: One study by researchers at Cornell University showed an improvement in air quality citywide – not just in the toll zone – and a March 2025 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found an immediate 11% increase in vehicle speeds.
So why hasn’t this been tried in L.A., the traffic capital of the country?
To their credit, L.A. transportation officials are receptive to congestion pricing, ordering up a study in 2019 that has yet to be released. But the reality of Los Angeles’ deeply embedded car culture could present obstacles, no matter how effectively Metro’s study makes the case for tolling.
Mariel Garza
Traffic reforms seen as infringing on motorists’ unimpeded use of the roads have drawn serious backlash in Southern California. Infamously, the city of L.A. removed brand-new bike lanes from Playa del Rey in 2017 after changes meant to slow traffic and improve safety drew protests from commuters. Sadly, a pregnant cyclist was hit by a driver and killed Jan. 31 while riding on a street where one of those bike lanes had been removed.
Before Angelenos buy into congestion pricing, they’ll first need to see a successful and very compelling real-life case study.
And LAX is a “natural place” to demonstrate the effectiveness of congestion pricing, UCLA urban planning professor Michael Manville explained to me. Traffic there is a persistent problem, no other fixes have worked, and there are just a few points of entry and exit. Setting up a system that closely monitors vehicle flow and adjusts tolling, similar to Metro’s Express Lanes on a handful of busy freeways in L.A. County, probably wouldn’t be complicated, Manville said.
The timing is also right. The oft-delayed automated people mover is expected to finally open in late 2026 and connect the terminals to Metro’s K Line light rail. Drivers who’d rather not pay a fee could opt for buses, trains, taxis or rideshares.
Mariel Garza
I can hear the complaints already: Why make drivers pay for something they now get for free?
But are they really getting something for free?
“Congestion is its own deterrent to using the road, because it charges a big cost in time,” Manville said. This would merely swap out what drivers currently “pay” in the time lost sitting in traffic for money.
The benefit? A pick up or drop off that’s a breeze.
The idea of pricing something so it isn’t overused “is a totally uncontroversial thing in almost any other domain of life that becomes hard to believe when we talk about roads,” Manville said.
But perhaps the most compelling reason to try congestion pricing is that traffic will probably continue to clog the horseshoe even after the people mover opens and with $1.5-billion in planned roadway improvements, according to Manville and Jacob Wasserman, a researcher at UCLA’s Institute of Transportation Studies.
With the 2028 Olympics and a direct rail connection coming to LAX – a place so dreaded for its traffic that some travelers will choose to pay higher fares and forgo nonstop flights just to use Burbank instead – we have a golden opportunity to bring transportation innovation to Los Angeles. If congestion pricing works there, Angelenos probably would be more receptive to trying it on other notoriously clogged roads in Southern California.
And I might actually consider giving more rides to LAX.
